Multidimensionality of time — hybrid notes | Michael Dickel

So, she walks onto the stage below the rows of chairs in the bar. Glass-noise filters from the bar in the back, the sound of drinks ordered, mixed, taken up.

She performs —
Not
linear
or
flat-world geometry
mere 1 or 2 dimensional mirror.
Not
even or odd
three dimensional
many-splendored
dimensions
Spreads out from
big bang
all possible directions
dimensions
collapsing back.
Self on itself
singularity time
time bubbles
toils, boils, foils us all
strings film pressure folds wave goodbye dimensions
High energy held in your sighs
time pressure builds
lost
this loving feeling
larger-on-the-inside dimensionality
experience flows
on the emulsion
surfeit of surfaces
surf faces surface breaking
wave bubbles roiling time dimensions

The judges take a moment, hold up their cards when the MC asks. She has an almost perfect 10, only one of the five judges holding up a 9. What the hell.

The chose me randomly to serve as a judge. I held up the 9. The history of us untraceable in the heart of her performance, not linear, always bubbling, moving through bubbles, bubbling up — narratized into linear experience only in our minds.

Memory, counter-memory, memory counters create, un-create, re-create our narrative(s) for us of us, each discrete, lost as its found, foundering in the deep sea of possible and probable. The experience more randomized, spirals — spins — spreads — chaotic, fractal rather than narrative, she explains to me as we leave the bar much later that night.

She had won the competition, slammed her poetry right up against me. Us. Her. The other slam competitors.

Memory, counter-memory: Jesus Hernandez, Chicago 8 / 7, erasure a part of every narrative, I call.